Just about a week ago marked the centennial of abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock’s birth. There were a scant handful of notable upticks in the media concerning the occasion. Pollock died in 1956. It was a car crash… a drunken car crash. The collision was deeply emblematic of Pollock’s life: fast, erratic and lethal.
The works for which Pollock is best remembered are the drip paintings. NPR host Guy Raz described the painting informally titled “Lavender Mist” (“No. 1”), “…violent stabs and drips of pastel colors — pinks and whites and aquamarines — with black slashes circling it like a web.”
As Harry Cooper, curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., adds, “There’s a lot of stuff on it; it’s — cigarette, and other things. We see some handprints that Pollock very purposely placed in the upper corners, in the upper edge.”
A lot of people don’t “get” abstract expressionism, the form of painting for which Pollock is perhaps the leading exponent. That’s understandable. It looks random, often formless, non-representational… in short, it doesn’t look like anything. Critics deride this kind of art as lacking substance. One often hears something akin to “anybody could do that.”
I have two words for those folks: try it.
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Any monkey can throw paint on a canvas. Pollock’s work is much more than that. It is not accidental. It is not random.
To understand this, we have to remember Pollock before he became the icon of abstraction that he is today. He was no dilettante. He studied under Thomas Hart Benton, the renown American regionalist. With Benton, Pollock’s paintings were nearly indistinguishable from his mentor’s. They were clear, technically wrought and decidedly representational. Fast forward a few years, Pollock’s work starts to resemble Picasso’s surrealism. In fact, it’s not until Pollock was in his mid-30’s that the splatter painting starts to appear. In 1947 we see the first strong thrust of his now-famous style. Pollock was dead within a decade.
All this is to say, that the seeming randomness of the drip paintings reflected serious training and conscious choices… almost. In a 1992 book by Claude Cernuschi, Jackson Pollock: Psychoanalytic Drawings, we see a series of 69 drawings done by the artist in 1939-40 while he was undergoing Jungian psychoanalysis. The book ultimately provides more questions than answers. Even so, Cernuschi poses one very tantalizing idea: Perhaps Pollock’s art speaks to us because it reflects Jungian symbolic archetypes.
Physicists and mathematicians have also weighed in on Pollock’s methods. Harvard mathematician L. Mahadevan and his collaborators at Boston College published research on Pollock’s technique in Physics Today that give us insight into the artist’s work. Their analysis reveals that Pollock had to be slow and deliberate to exploit fluid dynamics (of the paint) in the way that he did.
Other scientists have used a different estimation method for Pollock’s (perhaps unconscious) determinism. Jim Coddington, John Elton, Daniel Rockmore and Yang Wang used principles of fractal geometry to study the underlying spatial signatures of Pollock’s work. They conclude that Pollock’s paintings contain a sufficiently distinct vocabulary of geometric relationships such that his paintings can be authenticated and differentiated from imitators.
Of course knowing that there exists a method underneath the apparent madness of Pollock’s paintings probably won’t make you like them if you don’t already. But maybe the knowledge of the sub-textual structure holds a lesson for other venues. Perhaps it can remind us to look beneath the surface. To consider as Hebrews 11:1 says, “…the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
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Matthew Pate, a Pine Bluff native who holds a doctoral degree in criminal justice, is a senior research fellow with the Violence Research Group at the University at Albany. He may be contacted via pate.matthew@gmail.com